A special screening of prize-winning director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s 2014 blackly comic low-budget drama The Owners.
The film’s stinging social criticism of corruption and bureaucracy and the struggle for property ownership is at once poetic, surreal and visually arresting. This is a film of contrasts. The Owners is a bleak and tragic social drama, yet it is a film of bright brilliant colour which comes alive on the screen as a living breathing Van Gogh painting. The screening will be introduced with a short talk from Dr Rico Isaacs on his book Film and Identity in Kazakhstan: Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture in Central Asia (2018, I.B Tauris) and followed by a Q&A with the director.
Explore how cinema in Kazakhstan has emerged as an artistic tool to depict the day-to-day lives of ordinary Kazakh citizens while also providing a critique of Kazakhstan’s modern political condition.